The defeat of socialism and the collapse of the USSR turned into a real social catastrophe and regression for the five former Soviet republics of Central Asia. But the specifics of this region also lie in the fact that the restoration of capitalism, if we can use this term for a region where there actually was no capitalism before, was carried out by the ruling party elite from above, which transformed into the bourgeoisie class.
In Kazakhstan, former First Secretary of the CPC Nursultan Nazarbayev, in Turkmenistan - former first secretary of the CPC Saparmurad Niyazov, in Uzbekistan – former first Secretary of the CPC Islam Karimov led the process of dismantling the planned economy and pursuing a policy of privatization and the introduction of market reforms.
The exception is Kyrgyzstan, where presidents came to power not from among former party leaders, but where former party cadres played a leading role in market transformations. In Tajikistan, as a result of the 1992-1994 civil war, one of the former party workers and chairman of the collective farm, Emomali Rakhmonov, came to power with the support of the current Communist Party, who later became, like Nazarbayev, Karimov and Niyazov, the permanent leader of the republic and also led the process of establishing capitalism.
As a result of the counter-revolution, the states of Central Asia found themselves under the control of local bourgeois clans and family cliques, which are unable either to keep them viable and developing, or to provide conditions in which countless ethnic groups can live in harmony with each other.
Actually, this does not mean that there can be any more "progressive" and "democratic" capitalism. It's just that capitalism could only be established in these republics in this form with the establishment of reactionary bourgeois-nationalist dictatorships.
Instead of using the region's natural resources to develop the economy and social infrastructure, the ruling elites are actively plundering them with the participation of American, European, British and Chinese mining companies, which have actually begun dividing the region into spheres of influence. In this sense, Central Asia is under pressure from various imperialist players who are engaged in a fierce struggle with each other for influence and for the right to use local resources.
In order to maintain power, the ruling classes in the new formations use the methods of the police state, and in the case of Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, in general, we can talk about a harsh dictatorship.
The parties of the bourgeois opposition, where they exist, not only cannot offer the region a way out of the economic catastrophe – they even advocate for democratic rights only when their rights have been infringed. As events in Kyrgyzstan show, various groups of the bourgeois elite can, when it suits them, dress up in the clothes of fighters for democratic rights, and at other times they are quite capable of using national and ethnic differences to divide workers in the struggle for the redistribution of power and property.
The formal administrative borders that divided the Ferghana Valley in Soviet times have now become real, and various regimes keep them closed under all sorts of pretexts. There is a terrifying (if not immediate) prospect of Ferghana turning into a new Kashmir, torn to pieces, occupied by one republic or another, with the help of an indissoluble wall between them. A vivid example is the bloody pogrom of the Uzbek diaspora in the Kyrgyz city of Osh in 2010.
Every year, there are tensions between States over the allocation of water resources, and border conflicts constantly flare up between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. For 33 years after the collapse of the USSR, the leaders of the independent republics in the region have not been able to agree on the joint use of water, land and energy resources, which in a situation of desertification and population growth leads to inevitable interethnic and interstate contradictions.
The regression affected not only labor, but also family relations, and led to the return of the subordinate position of women to men and girls to their parents. Since the 90s, in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan, the forced extradition of girls and girls for husbands began to be practiced, and the forced abduction of brides spread, which ended in beatings and sexual slavery. The percentage of illiterate women has increased significantly. In Tajikistan, for example, a whole generation of girls aged 18-20 has grown up, among whom more than 50% did not go to school at all, but were engaged in household chores or worked in the fields.
The situation is aggravated by the growth of religious obscurantism, which further contributes to the enslavement of women in the former Soviet Central Asia. This is especially true for Tajikistan, southern Kyrgyzstan and a number of regions of Uzbekistan. Polygamy is becoming an everyday phenomenon, and in Kazakhstan, part of the bourgeoisie practices the practice of keeping young girls and girls acting as additional wives.
Such wild principles are cultivated from above by the ruling class, they are deliberately planted through the preaching of national conservative and patriarchal ideas at the official level. The current leadership in power is also trying to isolate the peoples of the former Soviet Central Asia through the introduction of the Latin alphabet in national languages and by depriving the younger generation of access to the Soviet cultural, scientific and literary heritage. This is certainly accompanied by a general drop in the level of education of young people and women.
Nationalism is also becoming the main ideological core of modern Central Asian states, to which is added militant anti-communism, as well as the praise of participants in the counterrevolutionary Basmach movement, representatives of the Alash party, who fought on the side of White Admiral Kolchak in the Civil War and collaborators who collaborated with the Nazis during World War II.
So, in 2017, the Kazakh authorities opened in the city of Kyzyl-Orda a monument to the ideological inspirer and organizer of the Turkestan Legion of the Wehrmacht and Muslim SS units Mustafa Shokai. Streets, shopping malls, libraries are named after him, and films are being shot. There are more and more publications in the press showing legionnaires who served under Hitler as "fighters" against the Stalinist dictatorship.
In Kyrgyzstan, at the end of last year, deputies of all parliamentary factions even initiated a bill on the full rehabilitation of all victims of Soviet rule, including legionnaires of the Turkestan Legion and soldiers of Muslim SS units. It is noteworthy that the lobbyists of this bill were the "Open Government", created with the participation of the American agency USAID, and the notorious Soros Foundation. In neighboring Uzbekistan, in 2022, all prominent leaders of the Basmati movement were rehabilitated.
In parallel, the process of total decommunization is also underway. The Kazakh liberal nationalist Ak Zhol (Bright Path) party is trying to adopt a law on the Holodomor according to Ukrainian patterns, as well as ban communist ideology. President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev formed a special commission for "rehabilitation", as a result of which 311 thousand criminals attributed to the "victims of the Bolshevik regime", as well as Basmachi, members of the Turkestan Legion of the Wehrmacht and SS units were acquitted.
Therefore, when approving the nationalist ideology, it is so important to destroy all Soviet monuments. So, the impressions of the barbaric destruction of two monuments to the creator of the Kazakh SSR Mikhail Kalinin are still fresh. Increasingly, we see acts of vandalism against monuments to soldiers of the Red Army, which are not properly investigated by the police.
The current situation in Central Asia in the context of the global economic situation means that the region will continue to experience social and political crises, and while there is no clear class alternative, these crises will be used by various groups of the ruling capitalist class to promote their own political interests. At the top of the social protests, they will put forward a populist program to fool e
It is also obvious that the protest moods and discontent of unemployed youth are redirected by bourgeois groups towards interethnic clashes and harassment of non-titular nations. In the same Kazakhstan, many people still remember the pogroms of Dungans and Uighurs in the south of the republic in 2020-2021.
At the same time, the threat of direct military clashes between states for dwindling resources increases every year.